IF YOU ARE LOOKING AT THIS WEBPAGE BECAUSE YOU HAVE
HEARD FALLACIOUS NEWS REPORTS ABOUT THE SUN BEING FROM THE SAGITTARIUS
DWARF GALAXY:

DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ON THE WEB!

IF YOU ARE A JOURNALIST,
PLEASE FOLLOW TRADITIONAL JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS AND DO
PROPER SOURCE AND FACT CHECKING! (IF OTHER SUPPOSEDLY
RELIABLE NEWS AGENCIES HAD SUBSCRIBED TO THESE BASIC
PRINCIPLES, YOU PROBABLY WOULD NOT BE WASTING TIME RIGHT NOW
CHASING DOWN THIS ILLEGITIMATE NEWS STORY!)

This web page contains the original press release text
from 2003(!) that has been corrupted/misinterpreted to "support"
the incorrect conclusion that the Sun did not originate in
the Milky Way galaxy. Read carefully and you will see this press
release only details the characteristics of the Sagittarius galaxy
and nothing more. All astrophysical evidence points confidently
and indisputably to the fact the Sun is now and has always been
a part of the Milky Way.

September 24, 2003

Contacts:

Fariss Samarrai

(434) 924-3778

Samarrai@virginia.edu

Dr. Steven Majewski

(434) 924 4893

srm4n@virginia.edu

Dr. Michael Skrutskie

(434) 924 4328

skrutskie@virginia.edu

Dr. Martin Weinberg

(413) 545 3821

weinberg@astro.umass.edu

TV contact:

(434) 924-7550

NEW MAP OF THE MILKY WAY SHOWS OUR GALAXY TO BE A CANNIBAL

Study Shows the Milky Way is Out to Lunch

Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling.

Thousands of stars stripped from the nearby Sagittarius dwarf galaxy
are streaming through our vicinity of the Milky Way galaxy, according
to a new view of the local universe constructed by a team of
astronomers from the University of Virginia and the University of
Massachusetts.

Using volumes of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a
major project to survey the sky in infrared light led by the
University of Massachusetts, the astronomers are answering questions
that have baffled scientists for decades and proving that our own
Milky Way is consuming one of its neighbors in a dramatic display of
ongoing galactic cannibalism. The study, to be published in the
Dec. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the
full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid
detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky
Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way,
so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the
bigger Milky Way.

"It's clear who's the bully in the interaction," said Steven Majewski,
U.Va. professor of astronomy and lead author on the paper describing
the results.

In model images made to show the interaction in 3-D, available at
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~mfs4n/sgr/, the Milky Way appears as a
flattened disk with spiral arms, while Sagittarius is visible as a
long flourish of stars swirling first under and then over and onto the
Milky Way disk.

"If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius
would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky," Majewski
said. "But at human, visual wavelengths, they become buried among
countless intervening stars and obscuring dust. The great expanse of
the Sagittarius system has been hidden from view."

Not any more. By using infrared maps, the astronomers filtered away
millions of foreground stars to focus on a type of star called an M
giant. These large, infrared-bright stars are populous in the
Sagittarius galaxy but uncommon in the outer Milky Way. The 2MASS
infrared map of M giant stars analyzed by Majewski and collaborators
is the first to give a complete view of our galaxy's meal of
Sagittarius stars, now wrapping like a spaghetti noodle around the
Milky Way. Prior to this work, astronomers had detected only a few
scattered pieces of the disrupted Sagittarius dwarf. Even the
existence of Sagittarius was unknown until the heart of this nearest
satellite galaxy of the Milky Way was discovered by a British team of
astronomers in 1994.

"We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalog of half a
billion," said co-author Michael Skrutskie, U.Va. professor of
astronomy and principal investigator for the 2MASS project. "By tuning
our maps of the sky to the 'right' kind of star, the Sagittarius
system jumped into view."

"This first full-sky map of Sagittarius shows its extensive
interaction with the Milky Way," Majewski said. "Both stars and star
clusters now in the outer parts of the Milky Way have been 'stolen'
from Sagittarius as the gravitational forces of the Milky Way nibbled
away at its dwarf companion. This one vivid example shows that the
Milky Way grows by eating its smaller neighbors."

"Astronomers used to view galaxy formation as an event that happened
in the distant past," noted David Spergel, a professor of astrophysics
at Princeton University after viewing the new finding. "These
observations reinforce the idea that galaxy formation is not an event,
but an ongoing process."

The study's map of M giants depicts 2 billion years of Sagittarius
stripping by the Milky Way, and suggests that Sagittarius has reached
a critical phase in what had been a slow dance of death.

"After slow, continuous gnawing by the Milky Way, Sagittarius has been
whittled down to the point that it cannot hold itself together much
longer," said 2MASS Science Team member and study co-author Martin
Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts. "We are seeing
Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system."

Does this mean we are at a unique moment in the life of our galaxy?
Yes and no.

"Whenever possible, astronomers appeal to the principle that we are
not at a special time or place in the universe," Majewski
said. "Because over the 14 billion-year history of the Milky Way it is
unlikely that we would just happen to catch a brief event like the
death of Sagittarius, we infer that such events must be common in the
life of big spiral galaxies like our own. The Milky Way probably dined
on a number of dwarf galaxy snacks in the past."

On the other hand, Majewski and his colleagues have been surprised by
the Earth's proximity to a portion of the Sagittarius debris.

"For only a few percent of its 240 million-year orbit around the Milky
Way galaxy does our Solar System pass through the path of Sagittarius
debris," Majewski said. "Remarkably, stars from Sagittarius are now
raining down onto our present position in the Milky Way. Stars from an
alien galaxy are relatively near us. We have to re-think our
assumptions about the Milky Way galaxy to account for this
contamination."

The new findings will help astronomers measure the total mass of the
Milky Way and Sagittarius galaxies, and probe the quantity and
distribution of the invisible dark matter in these systems.

"The shape of the Sagittarius debris trail shows us that the Milky
Way's unseen dark matter is in a spherical distribution, a result that
is quite unexpected," Weinberg said.

"The observations provide new insights into the nature of the
mysterious dark matter," said Princeton's Spergel. "Either our galaxy
is unusual or the dark matter has richer properties than postulated by
conventional models."

2MASS was a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of
Technology. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the
National Science Foundation funded the project. Additional funding for
the Sagittarius study with 2MASS came from the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation and the Research Corporation.

High-resolution color images of the Milky Way's interaction with
Sagittarius are available at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~mfs4n/sgr/

A visible-light (left) vs. 2MASS infrared-light (right) view of the central
regions of the Milky Way galaxy graphically illustrating
the ability of infrared light to penetrate the obscuring dust.
The field-of-view is 10x10 degrees.
Photo credit: Howard McCallon and Gene Kopan/2MASS Project

The 2MASS view of the entire sky, dominated by our Milky Way.
The faint extension below the center of our Milky Way is the
core of the Sagittarius dwarf. The bright smudges below and
to the right of the plane of the Milky Way are the Large and
Small Magellanic Clouds, which are more intact satellite galaxies
of the Milky Way than the Sagittarius dwarf.
Photo credit: John Carpenter and Robert Hurt/2MASS
Project

This image, and its associated movie,
shows the distribution of stars in the shredded
Sagittarius dwarf galaxy as revealed by the observations reported
here.
The image is based on the best model match to the map
of 2MASS M-giant stars. The thin
flat blue spiral represents the disk of our Milky Way galaxy (the shape
and size of this disk is not derived as part of this work). The yellow dot
represents the position of the Sun. Sagittarius debris can be seen
extending
from the dense 'core' of the Sagittarius dwarf, wrapping around the
galaxy,
and descending through the Sun's position. Click on the
image to obtain an MPEG movie showing a 3-D 'flyaround' view
of Sagittarius' current
predicament. Credit David Law/University of Virginia

This image, and its associated movie, is illustrative of
work by other astronomers, Kathryn
Johnston of Wesleyan University in this case, to simulate the
evolution
of the interactions of dwarf galaxies like Sagittarius with the Milky Way
through time. The animation, obtained by clicking on the image,
begins when
a Sagittarius-like dwarf galaxy was a compact, largely undisturbed
system, and follows
the Milky Way's disruptive influence over time as the dwarf
orbits the Milky Way. If this were the Sagittarius system, this
simulation would span
approximately 2 billion years in the past through 500 million years
into the future. Credit Kathryn Johnston/Wesleyan University.